How and About what do patients talk in health forums?
PRESENTER:
Mike-Donald Tapi-Nzali
Universite de Montpellier, France
ABSTRACT:
Nowadays, social media like Facebook and forums are increasingly used by
patients and health professionals. Most often, patients are laymen in the
medical field. They use slang, abbreviations and their own vocabulary in
their exchanges. In this talk, I describe the construction of a lexical
resource that aligns the vocabulary of patients to that of health
professionals. Our first goal is to use PAT (Patient Authored Text)
derived from social media to build a French CHV (Consumer Health
Vocabularies) in the field of breast cancer, by collecting various kinds
of patients' expressions (abbreviations, frequent misspelled words and
everyday words diverted by non-experts to talk about their diseases) and
then relate them to biomedical words. Secondly, we use the constructed
vocabulary to process our data and apply LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation)
to detect the different topics discussed by patients in social media and
compare them with the predefined topics existing in the
auto-questionnaries used in clinical trials.